


a frictionless place

by Sarah T (SarahT), SarahT



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 23:29:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11793687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/Sarah%20T, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/SarahT
Summary: Mycroft will protect his siblings, whatever the circumstances.When Euros is five, they make a pact.





	a frictionless place

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Spike for betaing.

Mycroft came into Euros’s room without knocking.His sleeves were still damp, his hair mussed, and his breathing fast, but his face was completely expressionless.She didn’t know what he was going to do.For the moment, at least, it made him look real. 

“He tripped,” she said.

“No, he didn’t,” he said.“You lured him to the edge of that well and you pushed him in.” 

“He hates me.He’s lying—“ 

“I worked it out myself, Euros.The candy wrappers, the footprints.” 

So he wasn’t completely slow.She put a quaver in her voice anyway.

“What’s going to happen now?Are Mummy and Father going to send me away?”

“Victor didn’t tell anyone,” he said.“And he’s not going to.I talked him out of it.”

Oh.She cocked her head, watched the possibilities bubble up one by one.“What do you want?”

“I don’t care if you hurt people,” he said.“You may do what you like to others.But not the family, Euros.And especially not Sherlock.”

The jar of his will against hers made her burn, dully.She looked at his dull green sweater stretched over his broad chest, his chubby hands.Vivid, distinct, _present_.Not an already solved problem, reduced to a few scrawls of thought and relegated to the background.It made her feel strange, as if he were crowding up against her.

“How will you stop me?”

He studied her solemnly.“I’m still much larger than you.”

“I could—“

“I know what you’re capable of, Euros.I just pulled a boy out of a well, moments from drowning.But are you sure— _completely_ sure—you could do it quickly enough?”

The scenario floated around her, expanded away in time.She gazed down the vistas.At the end of most of them: a heavy-set man in an expensive and old-fashioned suit, consulting a pocket-watch _._

_Really, Mycroft?_

She giggled.That was wrong, she knew, but he didn’t react, just waited, as formal and polite as an ambassador, for her to make up her mind.

“You’ll help?”

He sighed.“I’ll make sure you don’t get caught.”

She offered her hand, felt his large one close around it.“You’re a bad person.”

“I know,” he said, and didn’t try to sound sorry about it.She liked that.

  


Frogs, mostly.Squirrels.One rabbit.

But sometimes she couldn’t get any subjects at all.Her hands were too small, her legs too short.

Mycroft refused to help.

“You have to catch them yourself,” he said, lying on his bed, not looking up from his book.“I’ll help hide the evidence.That’s the deal.”

“I’ll get bored.”

“No, you won’t.”

His pudgy body, still stubbornly refusing to be manipulated.Such a trivial, mundane, ugly thing, not to be subject to her will.Like the rabbits that kept getting away.

She frowned and bounded onto the bed.He took her weight solidly, without a flinch.“Read to me.”

“You’ve already memorized every book in this house, Euros.”

“Read to me anyway.”

“I’m fully conscious you’re just doing this to annoy me,” he said.“It won’t work.However…”He turned a page.“‘If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.’”

“I’m going to be invisible,” she declared.

“You’re going to try,” he answered.

  


It was happening again.After the “accident,” Victor had spent much less time at Musgrave.But Sherlock had turned nine, and Victor had come to the party, and now they were running headlong across the fields, faster than her legs could carry her.

Mycroft kept a Swiss army knife in his nightstand.She was taking it out when he came in.

“No,” he said firmly, blocking the door.He had grown taller, but his weight had increased proportionally.The sight of him disgusted her.It was _wrong_ that he should be bigger and stronger.Physics was a betrayal.

“He’s taking him away.”

Mycroft should understand.Mycroft didn’t like Victor, either.He didn’t like anyone getting close now. 

“You’re angry,” he said. 

“No, I’m not.”She only knew what she wanted.That was all.The flashes of brightness in her head were meaningless.Noise.

“Euros, if you hurt him, you hurt Sherlock.That’s not acceptable.You know that.”

“I don’t care.”

He looked her over, chewing on his lip.“You have to find another way.”

She stared back, challenging.After a minute, he seemed to have made a decision.

“All right.”

He went past her and went to his knees, pulling out a box from under the bed.It was neatly stocked with medical supplies.He removed six sterile wipes and several bandages, sat on the bed, and began swabbing his forearm with a wipe.

She looked at the arm, intrigued.She hadn’t been able to cut into a _person_ in so long.And she liked the idea of breaching the resistance of Mycroft’s skin. 

“Across, not down,” he said.“And well above the wrist, if you please.Mummy and Father mustn’t see.”

He didn’t want to make a noise when she sliced in, but he did.The brightness spilled out of her with each cut.His eyes were wide, his breathing shallow.She couldn’t tell what it felt like when she had dissected herself, and she wanted to see if she could understand it now by watching him.But although she knew the expression on his face meant he was feeling something, very much, she didn’t know what it was.Pain, excitement, fear, pleasure: she couldn’t distinguish.She was color-blind, and could see only intensity.But she liked that.She was making him feel _everything_ , and for Mycroft that must be a terrible punishment.

The brightness had faded, and now there was only warmth, the warmth of the blood brimming up from the lines on his skin.She watched his pulse tremble through the cuts until the flow began to slow.

“Do you want me to—“ she began, reaching for one of the bandages.

“No,” he said, curling in his arm protectively.“I’ll do it.”

“With one hand?”

He looked up at her through the flop of his hair and bared his teeth.“I’ll do it.Go take a nap.”

And it was strange, she did want one.

“I’m keeping the knife,” she said.It was warm in her hand.

He picked up a bandage.“Keep it clean.”

  


She heard the door open, but she didn’t look up.The pain in her stomach was awful, forcing her into awareness of her body as the actual medium of her consciousness in a way she hardly ever felt.

Mycroft’s footsteps.She felt the edge of the bed dip under his weight, heard him set a glass of water on the nightstand.“Isn’t the point of the party that you’re _going away_?” she forced out.She didn’t want him to see her, trapped momentarily on _his_ plane. 

“You don’t look well at all,” he said, neutrally, and then there was the warm weight of a flannel on her skin.She stared at the sleeve covering his heavy arm—Mycroft always wore long sleeves now, covering the arcane alphabet of the scars she’d carved over the years—as he wiped at her face.

The rapidly cooling moisture was making her shiver.The cake seemed increasingly unlikely to stay down.Trust Mummy to give them all food poisoning—

Except Mycroft wasn’t sick at all.He was perfectly unruffled.She turned her head and snapped savagely at his hand, snatched away at only the last second.He chuckled.

“That took you long enough.I hope it wasn’t an overdose.”

“ _Why_?”

“I’m going to be away for weeks at a time during term,” he said.“You’re going to be tempted.I want you to remember why you should continue to take your promise seriously.”

Even through the chills, she felt suffused by a strange warmth.People thought of Mycroft as conventional and careful to follow the rules.They were even stupider on this subject than any other.Mycroft _would_ kill her.If he had to.If he could get the chance.

“I won’t be ten forever, Mycroft.”

“I’ll keep up.”

She was wracked by another bout of cramps and curled in on herself.Hateful.Hateful.To be in the body, to have to count out analog time, to feel her damp face and Mycroft’s hand on her back.

“It’ll be about fourteen hours,” he said, patting her gently.Until he was out of the house.Wise.“I’ll tell Mummy you have a headache.”

“She’ll think I’m sad you’re leaving.”

Like Sherlock, already moping.She didn’t like that look on his face.She would take it off.She just wouldn’t _hurt_ him to do it.

“I know.”

“I’m not.”

He laughed again.“Poor Euros.” 

She felt his weight shift as he prepared to get up.“Wait,” she said.

“What?”

“Just…stay a little longer.”

Even without looking, she could feel his whole body still, a reaction she normally used as her cue that she’d surprised him on some new axis of cruelty.Then his fingers began stroking her hair, very lightly.

“All right,” he said.

The touch was comforting.Or maybe it was just the thought that, if she was lucky, his attention might lapse, and she might be able to get to the knife and get in one good stab.

  


She stood in the twee little room of the twee little tea shop, looking at the packet she’d pulled from her bag.

Mummy was waiting back at the table where they were having their “special little chat.”About how she “was becoming a woman now,” and she “needed to understand what men expected.”It “might be a little difficult,” but in the end “it was all worth it.”“I’ve never regretted you three.Never!”

All said with a bright, tremulous smile.She could see now what Mummy was dreaming of.The dresses, the makeup, the series of young men, a ring and a swelling belly, the string of decisions validating the abandoned copy of _The Dynamics of Combustion._ “I won’t be happy until you’re well-settled, you know.”

This wasn’t the nineteenth century.Mummy couldn’t _make_ her do anything. 

She didn’t care.It was still as startling, as presumptuous, as if a figure in a painting had reached out and slapped her.

She looked at her face in the mirror, to see if she could understand it.No.She widened her eyes and bared her teeth, in the kind of face that made Sherlock giggle and shriek when he was younger.Maybe.

She slipped the packet into her cardigan pocket.

In the hallway between the dining room and the loo was a pay phone.It began ringing the moment she stepped into the hall and kept ringing as she went by.She hesitated on the threshold of the dining room, then went back and picked it up.

“Don’t do it,” Mycroft murmured.

“You’re too young to have that kind of access,” she protested, automatically crumpling the paper in her pocket.

“Yes, I am.”

“Then well done, you.”

“That’s rather pathetic as a distraction technique, don’t you think?”

Possibly.Though she suspected he liked it when she said he was clever.“She thinks—“

“I know what she thinks, Euros.It doesn’t matter.You promised.”

“Do you really think you can hold me to it?”

“Do you?”

She looked at the scuffed wooden floor.He had only started the job the previous year.He had already gained illicit access to the CCTV network and the phones.

“Will you come to Musgrave?”

A short pause.“Next weekend.Saturday.”

“Friday night.”

“All right.”

“I’ll have Mummy bake you a cake.We wouldn’t want you going into withdrawal.”

He hung up.

She was fairly sure she was smiling.

  


As the cars pulled up along the side of the road, she drew impatiently on her cigarette and blew smoke into the night sky.

Mycroft got out of the first car, another man, thin and rabbit-faced, from the second.Not a subordinate, she thought.After all, he was still junior himself.A criminal.Or criminal-adjacent.

“That took you long enough,” she said.

“Where is it?” Mycroft asked, ignoring her reproach.

She gestured with the cigarette.“In the fields, over there.”

Mycroft glanced at the man, who nodded and returned to his car. 

As he drove off, she realized she was shivering.Her thin blouse and ripped stockings offered little protection from the chill damp of the late evening.

Mycroft simply stood where he was and watched her. 

She stared back.She knew this was a crisis-point in their long game.It was one thing for a boy to say _You may do what you like to others_.It was another for a man to have to come out in the middle of the night to dispose of an actual body.

She couldn’t read him; his plump cheeks were blank.Most people were so predictable they seemed like nothing but shadowy apparitions of her own thoughts.It was always odd, and a little exciting, to be confronted by someone who seemed to speak and move independent of her will.

But it usually also made her want to take them apart, until she’d reduced them to simple manipulable matter again.She didn’t think Mycroft would try to kill her now.Given what had happened, she didn’t think he _could_.But it was a possibility—it had been a possibility since the very beginning.And there were the other forms of resistance, more subtle, he had always stood for.That he was standing for right now, observing her, deciding what _he_ would do. 

She spun the kaleidoscope of the future in her mind, composing and recomposing images from the fractal pieces. _The British government_.Some day, it could be teams of agents.Helicopters.Surveillance footage, rewritten.All for her.She suspended judgment.

“Tell me you didn’t involve Sherlock,” he said finally.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

And that was true: sweet slow Sherlock, with his head always buried in his chemistry books, would have been no use at all in the situation. 

“And you didn’t use the knife.”

She made her voice sweet.“That’s only for _you_ , Mycroft.”

He sighed, seeming to relax slightly, and slipped off his coat.As he draped it around her shoulders, swallowing her up, he said,“I knew sending you to university would be a mistake.”

She followed him back to the car.As always, the interior was spotless and smelled of a recent cleaning.“A mistake for whom?I’m doing very well.”

“For Mr. Fallows, at least.”

“He didn’t make a mistake.He made a choice.A very bad one.”

“And you, of course, didn’t deliberately cultivate a young man who would make such a choice, and thereby give you an excuse.”

“I thought it was more considerate to do it like that.”

“In the future, you may spare me the charade of consideration.”

He didn’t care about the body, not at all: only about the trouble.Beautiful.“Are you driving me back to college?”

“Yes.”

“The knife is there.”

He turned the key in the ignition.“So I assumed.”

She leaned against him.“I do love you.”

“No, you don’t,” he said.

“You don’t know that.”

“Nor do you.”

He wasn’t _quite_ stupid, this brother of hers.She decided, again, to let him live.


End file.
